The line's first impulse came from gold. Strikes at Ravenswood in 1868 and the fabulously rich Charters Towers field in 1872 gave Townsville a reason to push inland, and the first rails opened on 20 December 1880. To save money, engineers flung the track straight up the Haughton Range on brutal 1-in-25 grades and tight curves, a punishing climb that trains crawled at a few kilometres an hour. The line reached Charters Towers in December 1882, with trains taking more than five hours to cover roughly 140 kilometres. The climb proved so costly to operate that the whole section was re-graded in 1887; the old, abandoned alignment now carries the Flinders Highway. Even the rivers fought back. The Burdekin demanded a major bridge in 1899, designed by chief railway engineer Henry Charles Stanley, and that second crossing still stands today on the Queensland Heritage Register.

Once gold gave way to grazing, the line crept on across the downs toward wool and cattle country, reaching Hughenden in 1887 after a daily mixed train of roughly thirteen hours. Then came copper. The mines around Cloncurry, far out west, pulled the rails onward in a slow relay of approvals and construction. Crews learned to lay track across dry riverbeds first and build the bridges later, since the arid channels stayed empty most of the year. In a small act of frugality that captures the whole enterprise, 85 kilometres of rail originally shipped to Normanton, then stored unused at Croydon, was railed back to Normanton, shipped all the way around Cape York to Townsville, and finally laid in the new track creeping toward Cloncurry. The first train reached Cloncurry in December 1907; the weekly mail train from Townsville took nearly twenty-four hours.

The last and most consequential push came from a single discovery. In 1923, vast silver and lead deposits were found at Mount Isa. There was an urgent need for rail, but the government doubted the mine would last and balked at the cost. Only when the mining company guaranteed to cover any losses did construction begin in 1926, and the line finally reached Mount Isa on 27 May 1929. That stretch brought the entire half-century enterprise to a close and tied Mount Isa to the eastern seaboard. The government's caution proved spectacularly misjudged: the mine became one of the most successful in the world and is working still. Almost from the start the railway ran a beautifully efficient loop, hauling coal west to feed the smelters and metal ingots east for export, so that few wagons ever ran empty.

For the people who rode it, the line slowly grew more bearable. A Travelling Post Office sorted mail on the move from 1899, and one of Queensland's first buffet cars appeared in 1912, hitched on at Mingela to spare it the haul up the Haughton Range. The real revolution came in February 1953 with the Inlander, the first air-conditioned train in Queensland and the first with air-conditioned sleeping cars in Australia, a small miracle of cool, clean air crossing a hot and dusty land; it still runs the route in around 21 hours. But the country never stopped testing the rails. In February 2019, catastrophic floods tore up 307 kilometres of track between Cloncurry and Hughenden, damaged sixteen bridges, and derailed a freight train of 81 wagons at Nelia. Repairs demanded 100,000 cubic metres of ballast and 10,000 new sleepers. The line endures, as it always has, by being rebuilt.